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Friday, September 28, 2012

Bathroom Monologue: Tripping Brachiosaurs

You can rob a person, you can rob a party, you can even rob
the military up north – and if you can get away with it, go ahead. But if you
wanted to score a decent haul this age, you hit convoys. It’s been the way
since the first time some farmer bought up enough hadrosaurs to drag his stuff
across the desert and sell at an indecent mark-up.

Their investment invented my economic class, vis-a-vie, the entrepreneur.
Us. They buy hadrosaurs, and I buy a bunch of sleeker sauropods that can outrun
them, get my people onto the wagons, and overtake them. Presto: I’ve got enough
food to last the frost and can sell the rest at whatever mark-up I deem
appropriate.

We inspired a third economic class: the security guard. That’s
our natural enemy, or some would say predator, though one hasn’t eaten me yet. These
were triclopes and satyrs the farmers hired to ride with their convoys so that
I could sneak up behind them, knock them unconscious, and toss them overboard.
That is, to my experience, their only function. I always considered them overpaid.

The farmers eventually agreed with me, and put their pay to
buying bigger sauropods. The brachiosaur was the worst invention I ever met. They
carry so many goods that there are few to a fleet, and thus no stragglers for us
to pick off, and they’re so big that it’s very difficult to sneak up to one and
climb aboard. They also absolutely always crush you if you slip when you’re
climbing. I muchly prefer the security guard to the brachiosaur.

Still, brachiosaurs were a depression in our economy, not an
apocalypse. Deluxe-class sauropods are superstitious and spook easy. First time
I ever successfully robbed one, a monsoon did all the prep. No sooner did lightning
strike the coast, then that big lizard dumped its load and stampeded off. After
that, my fellow entrepreneurs and I took to setting off explosives, unleashing
deluxe-class carnivores in the area, or one time, climbing all the way up to the
brachiosaur’s peanut of a head and banging a gong in its ear. Scared the sin
out of it, and we picked up what they dropped.

But farmers are hard people. After a year of what I deemed a
spirited enterprise, they began loading their brachiosaurs with fake cargo. We’d
spook the critters, they’d drop their loads, and we’d rush in to crack open
containers full of zombies. Half of my associates were devoured in
the first of these practical jokes.

The farmers began sending two fleets a week, and we had no
idea which had goods and which had biters in them. It was supposed to scare us
off. We’re entrepreneurs, though, and refused to submit to temporary market forces.
We jumped as many as we could regardless, and you know how the farmers
responded?

They sold tickets. We struck in a few regular zones, you
see, and the farmers had them scouted such that they put in seats and made
twice as much as they would off of their crops from all the well-to-dos who
thought’d be funny to see my fellow businessfolk devoured. Last week, as I
sprinted from a fresh crate of zombies, I spied a woman in a flowing white
dress on the ridge above. She was applauding the zombie team.

So tomorrow we’re taking the next step. We’ll ignore the
brachiosaurs, and the cargo. We’ll still show up on time, though, because we’re
going to rob the damned audience.

Your flattery helped make my morning, Pete. Thank you! And zombies really aren't so expensive. You can get them in bulk, so long as your distributor can get them at all. The Z is kind of a hands-off zone.

This made me think of the progression of capitalist markets. First sell houses, then mortgages, then mortgage backed securities. Finally the audience is individual investors who want a piece of the action and they all get robbed. In this sense, the piece was fine allegory to me. Entertaining as hell too!